How to Change Folder Color on Mac

One of my favorite features of macOS 26 Tahoe is the ability to change folder color on Mac. You can finally move away from the default blue folder color and assign any color to a folder. You can even add emojis and icons as folder icons. Here’s how to change folder color on a Mac in macOS 26 Tahoe.

Change folder color on Mac

There are two methods you can use to change folder color on your Mac. Using the first method, you can change the default folder color from blue to any color you prefer.

Change default folder color on Mac

1. To change the default folder color, use the  Menu to open the System Settings app.

2. Click to open the Appearance settings and click the drop-down menu next to Folder color.

3. Here, you can choose any of the default colors. Notice that as I select the Yellow color, all my folders have turned Yellow from Blue.

4. If you want to set a custom color, click the Choose Color option and use the slider to set the color or use the color picker to pick a specific color.

Remember, the changes you apply here will affect all the folders on your Mac, meaning all the folders will use your selected color as the default color.

Change color for specific folders on Mac

If you’d like to change the color of specific folders on your Mac, follow these steps.

1. Open Finder and right-click or control-click on the folder to open the context menu.

2. To quickly change the folder color, click on any of the tag colors. This will apply the chosen tag color to the folder color.

3. If you also want to apply a folder icon, right-click on the folder and click to open the Customize folder menu item.

4. Here, you can choose from a list of hundreds of icons or use the emoji button to add an emoji as the folder icon.

The only drawback of folder-level color change is that you are restricted to using the default seven colors. As far as I can tell, there’s no way to set custom colors as you can do in the first method.

Customize Mac folder icon and color

That is how you can change folder colors and add folder icons on a Mac. You can click here to learn how to change folder color on iPhone and iPad, or click here to learn how to view clipboard history on Mac.